Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

1 Response

First for the domain authority / page rank, if you do the redirecting correctly (301) then you will probably see an initial drop off as the search engines try to figure out what happened, and then you should go back to where you were as it should still be taking into account the old domain's information along with the new domains info.

So the question there is whether or not the change is worth that minor hit.

So the second thing I would be asking is what does changing to the new domain get me?

Is it more memorable? Does it fit the brand better? Does it get your highest value keyphrase as the URL? etc... each answer would sway me one way or another.

As an example I once new of a site that sold church furniture, and they had the chance to get "Pews.com", while switching over to this URL would be a pain, I would totally suggest going after it, and embracing it as it hit one of their strong keywords.

The other option of course was to build a subsidiary site just for pews (since they sold more than just pews), but that is where you need to look at your brand, and how you want to market yourself over time. For the pews.com example I could easily see re-creating the brand as "Pews.com" as that is much more memorable, and quickly tells users in my industry what I do, and how to find me all at once.

The branding question is obviously the bigger one here as I think the historical value, and links of the domain will transfer over fine as long as you do the technical pieces you need to.

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.